We live in very strange times. The US finally bagged the man responsible for the worst attack on the US since Pearl Harbor and we are discovering a vast realm of possibilities for how to spin that death and what it means for Western-Muslim relations. One strange CBS 2-part headline proclaimed "Local Muslims Glad Bin Laden Gone, But Some Not Thrilled With Method--Say U.S. Should Be Bigger Than Using Force To Solve Problems." Is there a non-forceful way to kill someone? Now we learn that Osama posters are a good investment for the enterprising Pakistani retailer. And all this for a man, according to one article, who espoused a theology which constituted "a radical break with traditional Islam." (Like the Ahmadis?) We learn in that article that a Bin Ladenist "major deviation" was "the targeting of noncombatants." Isn't Bin Laden in pretty good company there? Or are Muslim-Brotherhood-offshoot Hamas and Khomeinist Hezbollah major deviants also?
In any event, Osama appears to have been Muslim enough so that his burial at sea is a major affront to the Muslim world (which is otherwise mostly "indifferent" to Osama's actual death?) A recent CNN article pronounces Osama's watery wake a "sad miscalculation" and quotes a number of authorities on Islamic law who buttress their rejection of the Islamic-correctness of this procedure with other choice remarks about contradicting "all humanitarian principles" and the "mutilation" of dead bodies. Weren't some Muslim servicemen involved in Osama's burial? Do you have to be on the faculty of Al-Azhar to know what Muslim burial customs are? Can you imagine the list of "sad miscalculations" the US would now be accumulating in its treatment of the captive Osama that many Muslims and leftists think we should have vastly preferred to a dead one? Maybe an inherently final "sad miscalculation" or two is the best the US could have hoped for. (h/t: Memeorandum)
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